Work Volition and Decent Work: A Meta‐Analysis

ABSTRACT Psychology of Working Theory (PWT) posits that work volition, a person's perceived freedom of work choice despite barriers, allows people to access decent work. As this relationship has received considerable research attention in the last decade, we conducted a meta‐analysis for synthesizing the accumulated evidence to this theoretically proposed relationship. We meta‐analyzed the findings of 43 effect sizes ( N = 18,659) across 42 unique publications. A positive and large summary effect size ( r = 0.48, p < 0.001) showed that work volition was strongly related to decent work. While there is considerable heterogeneity across the results, the strength of this relationship was not moderated by the proposed variables (e.g., cultural dimensions) in this study. Overall, we presented empirical evidence supporting the theoretical association between work volition and decent work postulated by PWT. By identifying a critical error in the current meta‐analysis literature—namely, the practice of treating manifest and latent correlations as equivalent effect sizes—this research also makes a substantial contribution to improving future meta‐analyses within the PWT.